[__turbobrew__]

Not sure why you are being downvoted. This is my experience as well. If you have experience at FAANG doing “foundational work” (read: datacenter engineering, core software infrastructure, multi zone computing, point of presence management) you are still in high demand. Many of the people I know in such areas are going to the big hyperscalers to build the infrastructure to run AI inference. There are not a lot of people who have experience doing this stuff and that domain is in very high demand.

[idontwantthis]

I created this post because my experience is the complete opposite.

[__turbobrew__]

The logically consistent explanation for both your experience and my experience is that you are on the other side of the K as people who are in demand and I am on the same side of the K as people in demand.

My guess is that one of the following applies: 1. You do not live silicon valley 2. You do not work at a FAANG 3. You have not built foundational infrastructure

I think if all three of the above are true, you are in demand to build AI hyperscalers. The trillions of dollars going into datacenters has to be built and managed by humans.

[idontwantthis]

I have nothing to do with any of those points.

[noprocrasted]

Do you know how to break into such fields, for someone having experience operating on-prem infra at a smaller scale?

[__turbobrew__]

Unfortunately no. I made the jump in 2022 from doing on-prem at a small company to doing on-prem at a hyperscaler when software engineers were very in demand and got placed in an organization which does physical datacenter design and core software infrastructure (software defined networking, service discovery, host management, datacenter failovers).

Back in 2022 you could make the moves, but I think now it is very hard to make the jump.

Part of the issue with building and running very large on-prem infrastructure is that you can only get experience by doing it. It not like you can run thousands of racks in multiple datacenters as a personal side project.